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Evaluation of the use of a Meta-population for Genomic Selection in Spanish Beef Cattle Breeds

Abstract

A total of 116 triplets from 5 Spanish beef cattle populations were genotyped using the BovineHD BeadChip. After the quality control, the phases of the parental chromosomes were established. From them, a base population for each breed was defined and 3 generations of 500, 1000 and 1000 individuals were simulated. Phenotypes and true genomic breeding values for a trait with heritability 0.3 were simulated. Purebred and admixed populations were used as training sets for the genomic evaluation, and purebred populations were used for validation. The within-breed evaluation yielded the highest accuracies (0.759 - 0.735). Moreover, the predictive ability of the admixed ×2 populations ranged between 0.681 and 0.628 for the populations included in the mixture. Further, the predictive ability of the admixed ×5 population ranged from 0.558 to 0.475.